education

MIT announced this morning an online learning initiative called MITx, which it describes as “a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform.” MITx is being combined with an MIT-wide research initiative on online learning and teaching.

Online learning is nothing new to MIT; if you’re aware of online education at all you probably know about OpenCourseWare from MIT, which makes notes, lectures, etc from 2000 courses available for free at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm (along with updates via an RSS feed; love you MIT.) From the announcement it seems like the MITx initiative is different from OCW in that it offers courseware and community and credentials.

The fact that MITx will “feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication,” (from the announcement) and “allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx” (also from the announcement) makes it sound like this is the next step between the raw content of OpenCourseWare (lecture notes, video lectures, transcripts, etc) and the complete package of an on-site, MIT education. (In one way it’s a tiny step, but in another way the idea of credentials being available through free courses like this is a huge leap.)

Not that I’m going to be able to investigate any time soon; a FAQ on MITx indicates that this new initiative will not launch until Spring 2012, and that will be in an experimental, prototype form. The same FAQ notes that OpenCourseWare is not going away (“OCW will continue as before: It will make course materials from across the MIT curriculum available to the world for free. There will be no reduction in the level of what OCW offers.”) and that, while credentials will be available through the MITx platform (“Those who have the ability and motivation to demonstrate mastery of content can receive a credential for a modest fee”) an MIT degree assuredly will not (“MIT awards MIT degrees only to those admitted to MIT through a highly selective admissions process.”)

Kevin Savetz has launched a new templates site. This one is for blackline masters — templates and worksheets for teachers and homeschoolers (and now I have learned a new vocabulary word.) There are currently over 60 of them available at http://www.blacklinemasters.net/.

There are four categories: Flags, Maps, Math, and Specialty. Blacklines include a clock face template, periodic table, and several country maps. (Hey, about some state maps?)

I must admit, this collection got me looking for more templates. Why aren’t there blacklines for individual states, for example? So I did a little searching and found some other ones you might find useful.

You can search by building name (first letter), school type, district name, county, designation (excellent, academic emergency, etc.) or performance index score for 2009-2010. I searched for building names beginning with M and got 315 results. Results were presented in a table that showed all the details up front — school name, designation, Mean ACT/SAT Score for 2008-09 (when relevant), etc. — but each school also has a details link.

The details link takes you to a page of more information, including full school street address, number of students enrolled, and attendance rate. There’s also data on student reading, writing, math, science, and social studies levels.

Ever needed example sentences translated into lots and lots of languages? Here you go. Tatoeba (http://tatoeba.org/) is a database of sentences translated into many (over 40) languages. It’s in beta, which means that some of the features (like audio pronunciations of example sentences) are woefully underdone. But there’s still material for language lovers.

The front page does have a random sentence function, but the search box is at the top of the page. Specify from what language to what language you want to search, and any keywords you want to include. I searched from English to Any and searched for the keyword Hello. I got 58 results, from Hello? Are you still here? to Hello, it’s me, Nancy! I must say some of these sentences had plenty of personality (“Hello, what’s that? Somebody doing street theatre or something?”) so play around with your keywords.

Search results include the from language you’re searching, and then the sentence in all the other languages available. Some sentences had just the English version and one other version (usually Japanese or French.) Other sentences had results in French, German, Polish, Vietnamese, Czech, Arabic, Portuguese… each sentence has its own standalone page, where you can (if you’re registered) post a comment. (Registration also allows you to contribute to the Tatoeba site.) There’s also a log of changes to the sentence. Sometimes you’ll see that sentences are also “owned” by people. If sentences are not owned, you can “adopt” them and make changes yourself.

You’ll notice that most sentences have an audio icon next to them and in almost all cases that icon is marked with a red slash. That’s because while there is audio pronunciation on the site, it is at the moment extremely limited, so for the most part you will not see it as an available option for the sentences.

I liked the idea of a database like this — languages broken down into simple sentences, with many available — but I didn’t have a lot of hope for the sentences themselves. I am happy to report I was wrong; I love a database that has sentences like “Math is like love – a simple idea, but it can get complicated.” Or the vaguely sinister Bring everything to ruin. I found that the search engine was the most useful way to explore the site, but you might like the lists of topical sentences created by users or even, if you just want to browse, the random sentence option.

Of course I’m looking forward to the audio but the site has a lot to offer already.

Seems like every time you turn around you hear the word webinar. All it means is a seminar or presentation that’s held on the Web, but to me it also means, “I’m sure there are tons of cool presentations out there and many of them are free, but I don’t think I’ll be able to find them all.” I feel better now that I know about WebinarListings at http://www.webinarlistings.com/.

This site lists Webinars. (Sometimes they’re not hard to figure out.) Hit the calendar link and you’ll get a nice list of upcoming events for the next week or so. Actually it’s too lists; a list of featured webinars and a list of basic ones. Between the two lists there were thirteen webinars listed a recent day, from “The Secrets and Lies Behind Social Media Success” and “Introduction to Team-based Authoring” to “Strategic Planning as Organizational Development” and “Planning Your First Webinar” (in case you wanted to get meta.) The featured listings seem to have a lot more detail, but event pages for both lists have the essentials (who, what, when, and how much) as well as a bevy of ways to share the webinar, as well as list it on your own calendars. Most of the webinars I looked at were free, though I did find one that was $79.

If you’re only interested in specific topics you can also search for a webinar. I did a search for Facebook and found six webinars between now and the end of the month.

The site invites webinar hosts to list their webinars here; you have a choice between free listings and $60 featured listings. Check out this page for details on how to submit a webinar. And if you want to keep up with changes to the site, WebinarListings does have a blog.